After the Boogers leave the dance floor and exit the room, the Driver, the host completes the ceremony and the act of Creation by collecting and putting away the rattles and drums. They will be brought out again periodically throughout the year, before the next Booger Dance the following fall, for other rituals that regenerate time. Such a ritual is the First New Moon of Spring, in which the old fires of the village are extinguished and the new ones ignited from Sacred Fire in the center of the Council House. Another is the Green Corn Ceremony, commemorating the ripening of the corn crop. Yet another is the Ripe Corn Feast, celebrating the fall harvest. There is also the Great New Moon Ceremony, held in October, the time that the earth had been created according to Cherokee folklore.(58) The Cherokee also have the capacity to abolish history daily, destroying the cosmos and recreating it in the ritual of "going to water."

A longing to annihilate profane time and dwell in sacred time (due to the terror of history) is found, according to Eliade, worldwide:

we see the desire and hope of regenerating time as a whole, of being able to live—"humanly", "historically"—in eternity, by transforming successive time into a single eternal moment. . . . The repetition of archetypes shows the paradoxical wish to achieve an ideal form (the archetype) in the very framework of human existence, to be in time without reaping its disadvantages, without the inability to "put back the clock".(59)

Eliade qualifies this assertion by interjecting that the desire to regenerate time does not depreciate life on earth and all of its qualities in favor of a spiritual detachment from the world. This "nostalgia for eternity," he affirms, speaks of man's longing for a paradise here on earth:

In this sense, it would seem that the ancient myths and rites connected with sacred time and space may be traceable back to so many nostalgic memories of an [page 85] "earthly paradise", and some sort of "realizable" eternity to which man still thinks he may have access.(60)

Eliade is careful to say in Patterns of Comparative Religion that:

Obviously there are no purely religious phenomena; no phenomenon can be solely and exclusively religious. Because religion is human it must for that very reason be something social, something linguistic, something economic—you cannot think of man apart from language and society. But it would be hopeless to try and explain religion in terms of any one of those basic functions which are really no more than another way of saying what man is.(61)

There is no question that the Booger Dance is informed by historical events, as the Boogers carry the names of the strangers that have raped Cherokee women, stolen Cherokee land, and removed the Cherokee from their traditional homes. The sexual names of the Boogers are probably the oldest, remnants from before contact with whites and other outsiders, when the monsters were representative of the chaos ascribed to agricultural dormancy and revealed in orgiastic rites of reversal. Further research in the field may reveal that the Boogers personified in contemporary performances are caricatures of modern representatives of chaos, personages that today threaten Cherokee survival, such as agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs or politicians.

To acknowledge the Booger Dance as only a palatable way for the Cherokee to deal psychologically with tragic historical situations, as a way of laughing at pain rather than weeping over it, however, diminishes its significance as a religious phenomenon. Such narrow admission also diminishes the ritual's practitioners who claim the ritual as a religious rite. To reduce the Booger Dance to a function that serves, as van Gennep might conjecture, merely as a rite of passage from one social state to another, or, as Victor Turner might posit, a social drama struggling with tears in the social fabric, egotistically asserts that those who practice a ritual do so ignorantly, without knowledge of the ritual's true meaning. Theories of reductionism therefore insinuate that the ritual's practitioners are naïve or perhaps dishonest; they also denigrate religion as the unscientific superstitions of primitives. Reductionism implies [page 86] appropriation, too, in that by fully explaining religion (in the words of Daniel Pals, "by reducing it to the dynamics of class struggle or a personality disorder"),(62) the theorist exerts an intellectual ownership over the religion by claim of "understanding" it. To reduce as such, refuting the beliefs of those studied (or at the very least, acknowledging yet circumnavigating them), is bigoted and unethical.

Viewing Speck's account of the Booger Dance through the lens of Eliade's theory, however, identifies it as one of the myriad rituals performed by humankind in a desire to transcend a meaningless existence by realigning with the sacred. The ritual allows the Cherokee to metaphysically journey back to their sacred origins, thus restoring to them their existentially real status in the cosmos. The Booger Dance is therefore not simplistic posturing or an archaism of actions practiced in a more primitive time conjectured by Speck: illuminated by Eliade's theory, the ritual serves to actually move heaven and earth, a potentiality that is at least harmonious with the sentiments of the ritual's practitioners.

Endnotes

1. Frank G. Speck and Leonard Broom, in collaboration with Will West Long, Cherokee Dance and Drama, 1983 (Norman, OK: U of OK Press, 1993), 30, 2
2. Speck, 3.
3. Speck, 5.
4. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1963), xiii.
5. Speck, 28.
6. Speck, 25.
7. Speck, 31.
8. Speck, 31.
9. Speck, 29.
10. Speck, 29.
11. Speck, 19.
12. Speck, 19.
13. Speck, 19.
14. Speck, 19.
15. Speck, 19.
16. Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville, TN: U of TN Press, 1976), 406.
17. Speck, 27.
18. Speck, 3.
19. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Arhcaic Realities, trans. Phillip Mairet (New York: Harper Colophon Books [1957 French], 1975), 68.
20. Eliade, Myths, 68-69.
21. Eliade, Patterns, 359.
22. Hudson, 406.
23. Speck, 32.
24. Speck, 32.
25. Speck, 33.
26. Speck, 33.
27. Speck, 33.
28. Speck, 34.
29. Speck, 34.
30. Speck, 34.
31. Theresa S. Smith, The Island of the Anishnaabeg: Thunderers and Water Monsters in the Traditional Ojibwe Life World (Moscow, ID: U of ID Press, 1995), 33.
32. Hudson, 353.
33. James Mooney, "Myths of the Cherokee." Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897-1898 (1900): 1-576, 439.
34. Hudson , 353.
35. Hudson , 353.
36. John R. Swanton, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, no. 43, 1911), 29.
37. Thomas Mails, Secret Native American Pathways: A Guide to Inner Peace (Tulsa, OK: Council Oaks Books, 1988), 133.
38. Hudson, 318.
39. Mooney, 255, 439.
40. Eliade, Patterns, 104.
41. Olivia Skipper Rivers, "The Changes in Composition, Function, and Aesthetic Criteria as a Result of Acculturation Found in Five Traditional Dances of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina." (Diss. U of WI-Madison, 1990), 59.
42. Rivers, 59.
43. Eliade, Patterns, 39.
44. Eliade, Patterns, 375.
45. Eliade, Patterns, 64.
46. Eliade, Patterns, 108.
47. Mooney, 469.
48. Reginald and Gladys Laubin, Indian Dances of North America and their Importance to Indian Life (Norman, OK: U of OK Press, 1977), 241.
49. Hudson ,408.
50. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd ed. 12 volumes (London: The Macmillan Company, 1911-1915), 11-48.
51. James Adair, The History of the American Indians, 1775 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968), 176-177.
52. Eliade, Myths, 105.
53. Rivers, 168.
54. Speck, 34.
55. Eliade, Patterns, 399-400.
56. Eliade, Patterns, 400.
57. Eliade, Patterns, 398.
58. Rivers, 152-163.
59. Eliade, Patterns, 407-408.
60. Eliade, Patterns, 408.
61. Eliade, Patterns, xiii.
62. Daniel L. Pals, Seven Theories of Religion (Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1996), 281.

[page 87]

Works Cited

Adair, James. The History of the American Indians. 1775. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968.

Eliade, Mircea. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. Trans. Willard R. Trask. 1954. New York: Harper and Row, 1959.

---. Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Arhcaic Realities. Trans. Phillip Mairet. New York: Harper Colophon Books [1957 French], 1975.

---. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1963.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 3rd Ed. 12 volumes. London: The Macmillan Company, 1911-1915.

Hudson, Charles. The Southeastern Indians. Knoxville, TN: U of TN Press, 1976.

Laubin, Reginald and Gladys. Indian Dances of North America and their Importance to Indian Life. Norman, OK: U of OK Press, 1977.

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft. Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1993.

Mails, Thomas. Secret Native American Pathways: A Guide to Inner Peace. Tulsa, OK: Council Oaks Books, 1988.

Mooney, James. "Myths of the Cherokee." Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897-1898. (1900): 1-576.

Pals, Daniel L. Seven Theories of Religion. Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1996.

[page 88] Rivers, Olivia Skipper. "The Changes in Composition, Function, and Aesthetic Criteria as a Result of Acculturation Found in Five Traditional Dances of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina." Diss. U of WI-Madison, 1990.

Smith, Theresa S. The Island of the Anishnaabeg: Thunderers and Water Monsters in the Traditional Ojibwe Life World. Moscow, ID: U of ID Press, 1995.

Speck, Frank G. and Leonard Broom, in collaboration with Will West Long. Cherokee Dance and Drama. 1983. Norman, OK: U of OK Press, 1993.

Swanton, John R. Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, no. 43, 1911.